Monet's persistence in painting in series, beginning with the Gare
Saint-Lazare and continuing in the Poplars and Haystacks,
attains an impressive climax in the series he devoted to Rouen
Cathedral. He began work at Rouen early in 1892, the year after
he had finished the Haystacks and the last of the Poplars, and
took a room above a shop in the rue Grand-Pont from which to
observe the west front of the great church. He broke off to return
to Giverny but resumed work at Rouen in the spring of 1893.
The rest of that year and most of 1894 was spent in completing
the paintings from memory. Twenty of them, ranging in effect
from dawn to sunset, were exhibited at Durand-Ruel's gallery
in 1895 with great success. Monet's friend Clemenceau justly
praised their `symphonic splendour'.
Pissarro
reproved adverse criticism in the letter to his son in which he
remarked on the series as `the work, well thought out, of a man
with a will of his own, pursuing every nuance of elusive effects,
such as no other artist that I can see has captured'.

Monet, it is clear, was as little concerned with the subject,
masterpiece of Gothic architecture though it was, as when
painting his Haystacks. Where the building invited and challenged
his ability was in the fretting of the surface as it caught the light
and the profound effects of shadow in the deep recesses.
The heavy grain of his thick paint gave its own animation to the
façade. Working largely from memory he exchanged the more fluent
technique of the
plein-air
picture finished at a sitting for this entirely opposite quality
of carefully worked-up impasto. In addition, without direct reference
to the building in reality, a poetic element in his nature seems
to have come uppermost. There remains the sensation of Gothic
without its detail curiously similar to that of Gaudi's Church
of the Holy Family at Barcelona (mainly built about the same time
as Monet was painting his Cathedrals)--another instance perhaps of
the subtle and far-reaching influence of
art nouveau.
Otherwise, rather than conveying the atmospheric reality of sunlight,
a painting such as the example given here can be appreciated as
a gorgeous dream.